BRENDA FREED: Foe of Winter, Friend to Ships at Sea

Review of Two CDs: UNTIL DAYLIGHT 1998 — SORT IT OUT 1999
Co-writers: Bob Clark, Suzanne Chesshire, Val Roessling
Producer: Mere1 Bregante // Creative Endeavors Publishing

In recent years, winters in Texas have been mercifully brief. We are grateful. I was especially so this year. For on 19 February, I tuned to KUT-Austin just in time to hear winter get it in the neck. Just in time, that is, to hear the radiant voice and cloud-cleaving lyrics of Brenda Freed. She sang several songs from these CDs. Winter fled.

The opening song, Floating Free, sets the tone for both CDs: I am stronger than my sorrows. These attack in battalions. Brenda does not merely banish them. She emerges from the battle unscathed, floating free:

I am dancing light,
Reflecting on doves in flight,
No more stones in my path,
All my sorrows fading fast,
Ooooeee, look at me —
I'm an angel floating free.

This CD is itself an angel, a messenger. And its message is singular: we are stronger than our sorrows. But if the message is singular, her voicings of it are quite plural. I quote from the extremes--one witty, one profound. In Tattoo, Brenda pretends to hamletize: to get or not to get a tattoo--that seems to be the question. But in fact the question is not whether at all. It is where: on a public or a private part? For she finally admits that "I once came close. I was in the chair. / But I couldn't decide which part to bare." Then in Walk Upon the Land, we learn the source of the strength that banishes sorrow. It is love, here seen and sung as oceanic. The ocean is our mother. She cast us up and out, from sea to rocky shore. That was our first sorrow. Yet we know how to float free from this and all subsequent sorrow. Jesus himself showed the way. For when he walked on water, it was to show that

If we live by love alone,
The world will be our home.
And we can walk upon,
Walk upon, walk upon,
Walk upon the land.

Love is a longing for completion. And this CD centers on a song that captures that longing. It is one of the most beautiful songs of the 20th century. It is Ships by J.B. Braden. However fine, all other songs on this CD either prelude or prolong this one. Examples: Stop the Rain and Faith Healer. The former laments love lost. The latter rejoices in love regained—through a healing faith.

Ships is a short story in song. For it features a man moving from problem to solution. The problem is his fear that he will lose his woman. The solution is the song itself: no woman in her right mind would leave the man who wrote this song. I quote verses i, ii, and v:

Not only is the man completed. So is his song, in a harmony of playing and phrasing. In phrasing, Brenda does not merely render each vowel: she rides out each a and i and u as these—waft the ship, wavelet by wavelet, to shore; And in playing lead guitar, Val Roessling does not merely resound each word and note. Rather, he rolls in the trough of, rises on the crest of, each breaking wave. Such harmony melts our heart. For it assures us that our ship too can sail past all sorrow. Indeed, that we too can float free--at least until the next storm hits.